Audiotopia

Josh Kun is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Boston Phoenix. He has recently co-founded Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit record label dedicated to excavating lost treasures of Jewish-American music.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Strangers among Sounds 1. Against Easy Listening, or, How to Hear America Sing 2. The Yiddish Are Coming 3. Life According to the Beat 4. Basquiat's Ear, Rahsaan's Eye 5. I, Too, Sing America 6. Rock's Reconquista Conclusion: La Misma Cancion Notes Bibliography Discography Index

"With Audiotopia, Kun emerges as a pre-eminent analyst, interpreter, and theorist of inter-ethnic dialogue in US music, literature, and visual art. This book is a guide to how scholarship will look in the future - the first fully realized product of a new generation of scholars thrown forth by tumultuous social ferment and eager to talk about the world that they see emerging around them." - George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture "The range and depth of Audiotopia is thrilling. It's not only that Josh Kun knows so much-it's that he knows what to make of what he knows." - Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century "The way Josh Kun writes about what he hears, the way he unravels word, sound, and power is breathtaking, provocative, and original. A bold, expansive, and lyrical book, Audiotopia is a record of crossings, textures, tangents, and ideas you will want to play again and again." - Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation"